Poetry by Thomas Sterns Eliot and William Butler Yeats"The view I am endeavoring to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of substantial unity of the soul: because what I want to say is that the poet does not have a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which the impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” These exact lines were quoted from Thomas Sterns Eliot’s (hereinafter Eliot) essay “Tradition and Individual Talent,” first published in Egoist, December. 1920. This shows the kind of approach that Elliot had towards poetry, an approach that most poets lacked an approach with historical motifs an approach that was shared by William Butler Yeats (hereinafter Yeats); for he once declared: “The mystical life is the center of everything I do, everything I think and everything I write. » Yeats and Eliot are two main modernist poets of the English language. Both were Nobel Prize winners. Both were critics of literature and culture, expressing a similar concern with Western civilization. Both, motivated perhaps by the Russian Revolution, or by the violence and horror of the First World War, described a sick Europe, literally falling apart, lacking the ontological sense of rational purpose that fueled post-Enlightenment Europe and America. 1). All these similar experiences make their poetry more valuable to compare and contrast since their thoughts were similar but one called himself a classicist (Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last romantic" due to his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism. and the spiritual. For a better understanding of these two poets, it is necessary to mention certain facts and backgrounds that influenced them to incorporate similar historical motifs (to some extent) in their poetry. WB Yeats was born in 1865 in Dublin. His parents were John Butler Yeats, portrait painter, and Susan Pollexfen. His family was upper class, Protestant, and of Anglo-Irish descent. His ancestors were church rectors. His mother's family, the Pollexfens, were known for their eccentricities manifested by an interest in astrology and magic. He was very interested in the super sensual experiences and visions that came to him “from the depths of his mind.” Eventually he became interested in Hinduism and the occult. During his life he developed interests in theosophy, ancient civilizations, psychic power, spiritualism, magic, eastern religions and the supernatural, which led to the conception of "The Second Coming" ( first published in November 1920).